ext3 crashes, data lost, system unable to use

[freakyruft]

I've got two partitions using ext3 (/ and /home) and discovered the same problem on both.
On a fresh installation of ubuntu jaunty jackalope during startup the ext3 partitions are being checked quite often, every time the system does it gives a console to me asking to repair the file system manually.
When running fsck multiple things are reported, I answer all yes and the system seems to work (although data was lost several times). Starting fsck again does not report any errors (also tried using live cd) - so I think fsck works well...
When the system is restarted, it starts normally (splash screen gets turned off, but that's ok for me) - then multiple applications crash because of "segmentation fault" (incl. apt, bash, firefox,...).
Next time I reboot same game, different time :-(
I wonder if the system is unable to shut down cleanly (timer on reboot is turned off - compiz and emerald running).

fdisk -l returns:

Platte /dev/sda: 320.0 GByte, 320072933376 Byte
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spuren, 38913 Zylinder
Einheiten = Zylinder von 16065 × 512 = 8225280 Bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00065ea3

   Gerät boot. Anfang Ende Blöcke Id System
/dev/sda1 1 6527 52428096 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 6528 19581 104856255 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 19582 23497 31455270 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 23498 38913 123829020 5 Erweiterte
/dev/sda5 23498 24280 6289416 82 Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 24281 25585 10482381 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 25586 38913 107057128+ b W95 FAT32

where /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda6 are the ext3-partitions...

[collinp (collinp)]

This sounds more like a failing hard drive than messed up partitions, as it affects both partitions at once.

[Michael Brown (michaelbrown2009)]

sounds like a hard drive issue.